Falwell's moral certitude was grounded in a belief in biblical infallibility and swathed in a showy, red-white-and-blue patriotism. It politicized the pews behind socially conservative candidates who shared, or said they shared the view that America's moral fiber was being eroded by secular hedonism and left-wing radicalism.

The millions of religious conservatives from many faiths who answered the call of Falwell and other fundamentalist televangelists such as Pat Robertson played a large role in electing Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush to the White House.

Falwell, who died Tuesday at 73, once said he began sermonizing about politicial empowerment among right-thinking Christians in response to the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. He formed his Moral Majority, a coalition of religious and Republican conservatives, in 1979, the year before Reagan's first-term election.

"I was convinced that there was a 'moral majority' out there among these more than 200 million Americans sufficient in number to turn back the flood tide of moral permissiveness, family breakdown and general capitulation to evil and to foreign policies such as Marxism-Leninism," Falwell wrote.

John Green, an expert on religious conservatives at the University of Akron, told The New York Times that Falwell's central insight that diverse religious groups could make common political cause over those issues they agreed upon - abortion and homosexuality, for example - has had "a huge influence on American politics." Indeed, his movement made those "wedge issues" political litmus tests for higher office that politicians have bucked or ignored at their peril.

For all his success as a political organizer and operative, Falwell bears significant responsibility for the poisonous partisanship that grips American politics today. Harnessing the religious belief in a fundamental global battle between forces of Good and Evil to the supple shafts of politics, which at its best is the art of principled compromise for the common good, has shivered the timbers of political bandwagons and cheapened the currency of statesmanship.

In large part, Falwell's legacy was to cast compromise as a sign of weakness and to make the demonization of political opponents, based on "moral issues," a common, effective, often cynical, and utterly divisive, political ploy.